By Desiree Salas (staff@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Feb 07, 2014 12:28 AM EST

Imagine walking on a beach and coming across this huge milky white blob. What would you do? Try and touch it or just continue your leisurely stroll along the coast?

Xavier Lim, 12, upon seeing the odd mass on Tasmanian shores, bent down and touched it and took pictures of it. And, with the help of his parents, proceeded to notify people about the find. As a result, he has unwittingly helped scientists record a new member of the jellyfish family.

"We were at the beach looking for shells and dad was like 'Whoa! Look at that' ... I kind of touched it ... it was pretty cool," Lim said, according to The Guardian.

The "gigantic specimen," found at Howden south of Hobart, stretched 1.5 meters wide and is one of three new species of lion's mane jellyfish, which appears "like a dinner plate with a mop hanging underneath," the BBC noted. It's also one of the biggest research scientist Lisa-ann Gershwin has seen in her career so far.

"There is a bigger species in the Arctic, and it gets about 3m across the body, so there are biggers species out there, but not in Australia," Gershwin explained.

"It's not new because it's large. It's new because its structural features are unlike other species, it just so happens that this one is huge ... it's the size of a Smart car," she said of the find.

This discovery is said to come amid an increased presence of jellyfish in Tasmanian waters and also in other parts of the world. Currently, scientists still are not sure what exactly caused this phenomenon.

"We're actually seeing a lot of jellyfish blooming this year. It's been a big year for gelatinous creatures of all sorts," said Gershwin.

"It is pretty warm this year. A lot of the sorts of things that are happening around the world - not just climate change but also ocean acidification, eutrophication, introduced species, pollution, overfishing - they're all impacting the whole world and we're not immune here in Australia. It's not like we're on a different planet," Gershwin told The Guardian.

"Southern Australia is known for some of the best fisheries on the planet but what's happening when those fish we're relying on are competing for food with the jellyfish?" she added.

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